My Hands On Review Of The Galaxy Note 3

Earlier this week Samsung started sales of the Galaxy Note 3 in 149 countries worldwide and I managed to pick one up. If you have been following us on twitter or facebook then you would have seen me having some fun with the device. So without further ado let me start today’s topic which is the my first impressions of the Galaxy Note 3. I’ve been playing around with the device for about 5 days now and to be honest I’m still a bit blur in the features section of the device. It seems that every day I am learning about a new feature. I have to say that there is literally a massive amount of new features which Samsung is bundling with the Note 3 and in order to utilize the device to its full potential you’ll need to dig up all of the hidden features and learn them up. Most of the new features which are present in the Note 3 are related to either the S Pen or accessibility. The feature which I like the most is the new Action Memo which replaces the old popup S Note on previous generation Note devices. The new action memo is like the most powerful thing in the phone. You can just scribble out some notes and save it, and when the time comes you can click the special button on the top and you can toggle a bevy of functions like call this number, search the web, etc. I’ll be going more in depth with this in an upcoming article all about the S Pen. Also the handwriting recognition engine on the Note 3 is just amazing it can detect my poor handwriting pretty accurately. I wasn’t quite happy about the new multi window as most of the new functions to it like running two same apps at once is only available to Samsung apps. With the new Pen Window feature I’m actually pretty impressed with it as you can really multitask more efficiently with it. But there is a slight downside which is currently there is only a limited amount of apps which support it and most of those apps are simple ones like calculator, contacts, etc. 

Other than that I’m actually enjoying Air Command as it is really useful and I love the sound when you toggle the feature. Additionally there seems to be a design flaw with the S Pen silo on the Note 3, I find it pretty hard to detach out of the silo. But after some practice and with the help of some fingernails the detaching of it is made a little bit more easier.

'the s pen is now better than ever'

Moving on to the performance of the Note 3, the device has the Snapdragon 800 processor onboard paired up with 3GB of RAM. During the few days of using this device I didn’t experience any major lagging problems but I did notice something, it seems that the animations pumped out by touchwiz are a bit slow but a little animation boost greatly helped and it made the device look more smoother. As usual to Samsung device the RAM usage is pretty high and the usual RAM usage if I’m working on light tasks like texting is around 1.4GB out of the 2.38GB available. But the RAM usage will go up to 2.1GB when it is heavily used. But even then I did not feel any lag or stuttering with the device whatsoever. This time around Samsung has packed a 3200mAh battery with the Note 3. My preliminary findings on the battery life of the device is pretty good. The battery can power up the display for up to 7 hours and the device can easily pass through a day with moderate to heavy usage. Finally I’m going to talk about the overall look and feel of the device. This time around Samsung is throwing away the thought of their hyperglaze backing and replacing it with faux leather which deep down is still plastic. I actually like the feel of the back, basically it feels like the back of the Galaxy S2 with a little bit less roughness to it. The feeling of holding the device in your hand is pretty good also, overall the 20g weight difference compared to the previous Galaxy Note models made a big difference as the Note 3 feels significantly lighter in the hand. Well that’s about it for my first impressions of the device, stay tuned next week for my full review of the device. If you want to see more on the Note 3 go follow us on twitter, instagram and facebook, I’ll be posting up most of the pictures there. Also here is a short 4K video test which I took earlier this week. 

Subscribe to this blog to get up to date tech content. Buy me a cup of coffee to keep me going by donating to me via paypal. Follow us on our social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, instagram and Google Plus.